Often Irreverent, Mostly Rational Blog for Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. One Day, We'll Be Perfect.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Jesse Barfield answers the questions you never bothered to ask

Completely by accident, we stumbled across a columnish first-person thingy posted today on cbcsports.ca by neophyte colour commentator and former Blue Jays rightfielder Jesse Barfield.

We don't want to get on Barfield's case too much, because he seems like a genuinely nice fellow, but someone's got to give Jesse a little direction on these things. The first rambling post of the year can pretty much be summed up thusly: I'm a baseball insider, and you're not.

It starts off all wrong, right from the get-go: "Fans often wonder how a former player feels about the game after he has retired, so to open this baseball season, you will get to go behind the scenes with me and find out."

Err...no. We don't. We don't wonder about former players. Generally we're too preoccupied with the guys who are still playing to give a flying fadoo about the guys who used to play once upon a time. (Except for Bob File...where's that guy at?)

The rest of the post kinda meanders about, giving us little insight about stuff we weren't particularly jazzed to hear about. However, if you had your roto team killed by Josh Barfield last year, you'll be happy to know that he's doing just fine. We're sure that Josh will remain totally positive (just like his Dad!) watching Asdrubal Cabrera trot out to second base all season long.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativity UpdateDid you know that the Blue Jays have 77 people working in their ticket sales and service department? You can count them right here. Wow. That's a lot of people, isn't it? With a workforce of that magnitude and the right vision, they might just be able to sell tickets to at least a dozen or so people in the GTA once single-game ticket sales open later this week for those outside of Detroit and Boston.

One of my favourite Mark York predictios was during Spring Training last year he boldly declared that Josh Barfield would steal 70 bases in 2007 for the sole reason of being tutored by Ricky Henderson.